RMIT Design ARCHIVES JOURNAL Vol 1 Nยบ 2 2011
STENTNOC
ADDITIONS TO THE COLLECTION
ANATOL KAGAN COLLECTION Anatol Kagan (1913–2009) architect Michael Bogle 4–7
WILLIAM NANKIVELL COLLECTION William Nankivell (1928–2002) architect Harriet Edquist 8–13
Towards a history of student activism in Landscape Architecture 14–15
RESEARCH
Michael O’Connell: The Lost Modernist Harriet Edquist 16 icamAustralasia Symposium 2011 16
rmit design archives journal Journal Editor Harriet Edquist
Editorial Assistance Kaye Ashton
Design Letterbox.net.au
contact rmitdesignarchives@rmit.edu.au www.rmit.edu.au/designarchives issn 1838-9406 Published by rmit Design Archives, rmit University Text © rmit Design Archives, rmit University and individual authors.
Cover Image Anatol Kagan, National Opera House, Sydney, perspective, 1956.
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This Journal is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.
EDITORIAL
Two collections representing the work of well-known local architectural practices have recently been donated to the rmit Design Archives, adding significant depth to our existing holdings. The Anatol Kagan Collection includes material relating to the Russian-born émigré’s Melbourne practice in the 1940s and early 1950s, and his subsequent Sydney practice from the 1960s. His post-war domestic architecture can be directly compared with that of other émigré architects whose work is represented in the Archives, including Frederick Romberg (rda Newsletter #1 2008), Ernest Fooks (some of whose drawings and books were donated to rmit a number of years ago by Noemi Fooks) and Frederick Sterne (rda Newsletter #1 2008). Each received his architectural education at a major European Technische Hochschule (respectively Berlin, Zurich and Vienna) and they all arrived in Melbourne in the few months between late 1938 and mid 1939. Colocation of these archives in one space prompts a comparison between them, for example, the way the careers of these architects unfolded in Australia in relation to the training they received in Europe and commonality of interests (town-planning, for example, which was of special concern to Kagan and Fooks). The William Nankivell Collection on the other hand, documents the practice of an architect from the next generation whose individual contribution to local architecture has been somewhat subsumed under the reputation of the Joyce Nankivell partnership. This Collection allows us to gauge the career of Nankivell before and after his partnership with Bernard Joyce and also to consider works, such as the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur on which they collaborated, that have been neglected in favour of Joyce’s more iconic ‘series’ housing. Both architects taught at rmit in the 1960s and early 1970s (following the example of Romberg, Fooks and Sterne in the 1940s and 1950s) and cultivated a wide circle of friends in allied design fields, amongst them graphic designer Alex Stitt, whose archive was donated to the rda at the beginning of 2011 (rda Journal #1 2011). Looking at these collections together we can begin to discern the networks and narratives that have helped shape our architectural legacy and also our understanding of Melbourne as a ‘creative city’. Harriet Edquist, director
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ADDITION TO THE COLLECTION
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ANATOL KAGAN COLLECTION
GIFT OF DAWN G KAGAN AND FAMILY
This gift includes biographical documentation, books, correspondence, magazines, media clippings, notebooks, photographs, plans and reports, relating to the life and career of Russian-born émigré architect Anatol Kagan. Anatol Kagan (1913–2009): architect Michael Bogle
Anatol Kagan, the former principal of the Melbourne architectural office Anatol Kagan and Associates began his Victorian practice in the 1940s and moved to Sydney in 1961 to take up a position in the nsw Department of Public Works. He retired in 1974 and after his death in 2009 his family lodged his papers with the rmit Design Archives. Kagan was born in October 1913 into a prominent St Petersburg family of the Russian intelligentsia. His father was the educator and publisher Abram Saulovich Kagan (1885-1983), a prominent member of the revolutionary Menshevik faction of the Social-Democratic Labour Party. By 1917, the Mensheviks had lost the struggle for political power to the Lenin-led Bolsheviks and their allies and by 1921 the party was declared illegal; the leaders were arrested but later allowed to emigrate. 1 In 1922, Kagan and his family left Russia and took up residence in Berlin where a large, wealthy Russian émigré community was thriving in the affluent Charlottenburg area which was aptly referred to as ‘Charlottograd’. Their fellow exiles included such figures as the St Petersburg family of Vladimir Nabokov as well as Boris Pasternak and Ilya Ehrenburg. Kagan attended a Russian émigré school, and after 1924 the Falk-Real Gymnasium (in Lutzowstrasse, south of Berlin Tiergarten), later enrolling in the Technische Hochschule Berlin in 1932. While he was interested in the Bauhaus school that had recently relocated from Dessau to Berlin under Mies van der Rohe, he did not join the institution which was closed in 1933. 2 He remained at the Technische Hochschule joining the design class of Hans Poelzig (1869-1936). 3 Poelzig was later replaced by Professor Karl Caesar and Kagan recalled that he became Caesar’s ‘favourite student’. 4 He also recalled that ‘during the first two years of my studies, I hardly attended any lectures and did most of my studying on my own’ and that the style he adopted was ‘Third Reich neo-classical.’ 5 Kagan completed his studies and achieved his Diplom-Ingenieurs in 1937. 6 In March 1938, with war imminent, the Kagan family left Germany; Kagan’s parents and sister moving to
Brussels. From there they migrated to New York where Abram successfully continued his career as a publisher. 7 Kagan went to London where he lived in a boarding house in Hampstead Heath while working as an architectural assistant in the city office of Ernest Schauferberg who later provided him with a reference. By the end of 1938, Kagan was joined by his German fiancée, Inge Wiener, and they were married on Christmas Eve. They had arranged to migrate to Australia and arrived in Melbourne in early 1939 on the S.S. Orcades. 8 Kagan soon found work with various architectural firms including J Plottel; Arthur and Hugh Peck; Seabrook & Fildes; and, Buchan, Laird and Buchan. While with Seabrook & Fildes he was involved in design work for two blocks of flats in Simpson Street and one in Hotham Street, East Melbourne, as well as the Warracknabeal Town Hall. 9 Despite having been in Australia for only a few months, Kagan sought to join the Australian military once war was declared in September 1939. In the interim, he was employed by Australian Consolidated Industries (aci), a glass manufacturer considered a protected industry vital to the war effort. Rather than join the forces, he remained with aci until 1944, probably under a ‘Reserved Occupation’ status. 10 He found time to study for his rvia Board exams and passed the test for Professional Practice in April 1940 but had to repeat some of the other exams. He became an Associate of the rvia on 23 March 1947. While at aci he formed a partnership with Yury (George) Blumin to take on architectural projects with the Broons and Son factory in Brunswick and a block of flats in Punt Road, St Kilda, that were illustrated in Building (24 April 1942) under the name of Blumin and Kagan.
Top Kagan, Shipman residence, 1949. Australian House and Garden, Aug-Sept, 1949. Bottom Left Kagan, reconstruction of historical centre, St Petersburg, notebook. Bottom Right Anatol Kagan & Associates Christmas card, 1954. From left: W R Millar, A Kagan, Y G Blumin and R Barnard-Brown.
Kagan’s architectural skills were also needed by the Commonwealth Department of Works and Housing as the widely forecast housing shortage crisis now seemed inevitable. In 1944, he found himself working on the prefabricated steel Beaufort House project at the Commonwealth Department of Aircraft Production at Fishermans Bend under the direction of Arthur Baldwinson. 11 The Beaufort House programme was terminated by January 1948 5
ANATOL KAGAN CONTINUED
and Kagan then moved to the Planning Division of the Commonwealth Department of Works and Housing where he supervised the implementation of the Commonwealth and State Housing Agreement. 12 In 1949, he left this position to found his own practice. Anatol Kagan and Associates was located at 549 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, and his staff initially included Blumin, R Barnard-Brown araia and William Robert (Bill) Miller. 13 They produced significant residential work in the affluent suburbs of Kew, Caulfield and Brighton, favouring rectilinear modernist compositions, often with protruding bays and timber-mullioned window walls shaded by deep eaves. 14 Masonry, often brick (face brick or rendered) was their preferred medium, alternating with timber cladding, and the influence of Roy Grounds, Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd is evident. Growing restless by the mid-1950s, Kagan and his family moved to Sydney with a view to extending his practice.15 Later he wrote: ‘I had conducted a successful architectural practice in Melbourne where I had acquired a reputation for designing luxury homes which I really did not want to have. I […] had not become an architect in order to design homes for wealthy upstarts with whom I would be embarrassed to mix socially’. 16 However Kagan’s Sydney practice did not thrive, despite designing a house for the Russian émigré property developer Walter (‘Vuvku’) Rivkin in Darling Point and two other residences on the Northern Beaches. 17 He also prepared a submission for the 1956 National Opera House competition with the required extensive documentation. When Jørn Utzon was announced the winner in early 1957, Kagan was incensed and became a tireless campaigner against the Utzon design, writing letters to the Sydney press, politicians and the premier Joe Cahill. Some letters were written under the authority of the Communist Party of Australia (cpa), Mosman Branch, however Kagans’s official association with the cpa is unclear. 18 His papers include extensive Opera House files documenting his designs as well as his protracted campaign against Utzon’s winning scheme. In 1956, Kagan began to produce the first notes and an outline for a planning and design study for Leningrad (St Petersburg, the city of his birth) that occupied him for the rest of his working life. Here he found an outlet for his communist-inspired views of urban planning that found little sympathy in Australia. In a 167- page typescript introduction to the project he noted that his ‘first notes of the draft go back to 1956. A wide […] concerted effort to get the writing under way has been made since 1962. […] After the beginning of 1965, certain chapters of the proposed work have been drafted.’ There were
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chapters on the ‘Pioneers of Socialism’ and the Soviet programme for the ‘Marxist integration of town and country’. 19 The initial study was devoted to the reconstruction and re-planning of Vasilievsky Ostrov (Vasilievsky Island), Leningrad’s centre. 20 Returning to Melbourne in 1957, Kagan tried to have his Vasilievsky Ostrov project accepted as a diploma thesis in the post-graduate course in Town and Country planning at Melbourne University. The request was denied. With undisguised contempt, Kagan wrote: ‘the subject was not accepted as suitable (it was, no doubt beyond the competence of the examiners to assess such a subject.) The writer [his memoirs use the third person] nevertheless persevered.’ 21 The University eventually granted Kagan a diploma in Town and Regional Planning in May 1962 and he was admitted to the Australian Planning Institute in October 1963. Fortified by his studies in planning and seeking more ‘socially useful’ work, Kagan joined the nsw Department of Public Works in 1961 and left his Melbourne practice to the architect Peter Lyall: I had been very happy to change from my private practice to what I considered was work with a social commitment. [.. .] I soon began to realize that such work had to be undertaken within the framework of a bureaucratic structure. As I progressed to a senior position I came up against unexpected obstacles […] and even met up with a conspiracy against me. […] I left the Department in 1974 as soon as I reached retirement age.22 His principal work at the Department of Public Works was initially public schools but quickly centered on alterations and additions to hospitals, in particular State Psychiatric Hospitals. 23 In 1968, he visited New York City and the surrounding area to study the design of mental health institutions. 24 ‘Architecture for Psychiatric Services’, a report based on his travels, was published by the nsw Department of Public Health that year. In 1971, he returned to the topic and travelled once more to New York with a further trip to Washington DC for interviews and site visits. An undated typescript of a revised report was prepared but does not appear to have been officially published. 25 Toward the end of his career as a nsw Government architect, Kagan was able to draw on his psychiatric studies to carry out an investigation for Schmaeling and Associates titled the ‘Foreign Affairs Communication Centre. Environmental Report’ that outlined the interior architecture required for an enclosed and isolated space. 26 Schmaeling and Partners had had an earlier association with the nsw Department of Public Works. On his retirement in 1974 Kagan returned to his Leningrad Planning Project and visited Russia in 1975 and 1979 where he developed contacts with
the architects, N V Baranov (1909-1989), former Chief Architect and Planner, Leningrad, and G N Buldakov (1924–1990), Assistant Chief Architect, Leningrad, (later Chief Architect of the ussr). 27 In 1986, after thirty years of study, Kagan made arrangements to present the city of Leningrad with his designs. As Dawn Kagan recalled, they arrived on the doorstep of the Leningrad Chief Architect’s Office: with a […] photograph album of all these drawings to give to Buldakov and when we got there and rang to make the appointment, he had been away ill. […] Anatol said: ‘Could I speak to his Deputy?’ There was no Deputy. So here we are […] on the steps of GLAVAPU [Chief Architectural Administration office] where we were talking to the doorman […] ‘Please, would you please pass this folder of drawings to whomsoever becomes appointed as the Deputy to Mr. Buldakov? […]. So we left this [package] with the doorman and the doorman said: ‘Yes, of course, I will do that for you.’ But we never heard. […] That, of course, was the end of that. 28 Undeterred by this setback, in 2003 Kagan began to address a new issue for his plan for Leningrad and opened new correspondence with Russian officials on a St Petersburg polder project that responded to the perennial threat of floods along the Neva River in the city. The Soviet Union had planned and initiated a dam project in the 1970s but it did not proceed to completion. Kagan’s work on St Petersburg/Leningrad now included his polder system project for flood control (with architectural embellishments), an historic reconstruction programme (with extensive documentary photographs of the city) and a city planning scheme that would create a new urban centre. This project had consumed his working life until his sight deteriorated later that year and he grew too frail to continue. 29 Anatol Kagan died on 2 July 2009 in the Montefiore Home, Hunters Hill, Sydney. Michael Bogle, PhD, is a design historian specialising in the history of Australian design and architecture. His doctoral dissertation, completed in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, was on the work of architect Arthur Baldwinson.
1 Leonard Schapiro, The Government and Politics of the Soviet Union (Vintage, 1977), 40-43. 2 Anatol Kagan, ‘Travels in Europe’, typescript, Anatol Kagan Collection, RMIT Design Archives, 324. 3 Although Kagan was cavalier about Poelzig, the lecturer was a prominent member of the Deutscher Werkbund, exhibited at the Weissenhof exhibition, Stuttgart, executed set designs for UFA and enjoyed major architectural commissions. 4 Karl Caesar was the author of Alte and Neue Baukunst in Hessen-Nassau, 1910. 5 Kagan, ‘Travels in Europe’, 325, 326. 6 In 1946 the former Technische Hochschule Berlin was re-established by the British occupying power as the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin or TUB). Albert Speer (diploma, 1927) and Karl Friedrich Schinkel were notable Technische Hochschule Berlin architecture graduates. 7 Kagan, ‘Travels in Europe’, 327. Although Kagan was in correspondence with his family, he did not see them until 1962 when they were living in Forest Hills, New York. The Abram Saulovich Kagan Papers, are held in the Soviet and East European Independent Press Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University NY and include Kagan’s correspondence (1938-1939), photographs, printed materials (books published by his firms) and audio tapes (including an interview with Kagan by Marc Raeff). The Collection was discussed in a conference paper by Susan Summer from the Butler Library, Columbia University, ca.1991. 8 A card for the S.S. Orcades, Voyage 4, 1939, survives in the Anatol Kagan Collection, RMIT Design Archives.
9 Kagan recalled that Peck and Peck asked him to work on a Gothic Revival façade for Wadhurst Hall, Melbourne Grammar’s Middle School. Anatol Kagan Recollections, compiled c 2009, courtesy Dawn Kagan. 10 By this time Anatol and Inge Kagan had divorced and Kagan had married Effie James. 11 See Michael Bogle, ‘The Beaufort House’, CHS Magazine, Construction History Society 82, August 2008, 10-13. 12 Kagan Recollections. Here he met his third wife, Dawn Gweneth Jackson, who was working in the Department’s Rent Control section. 13 Letterhead on documents in the Anatol Kagan Collection, RMIT Design Archives. 14 Kagan also participated in the Mt Scopus War Memorial College design in association with Ernest Fooks. The attribution of the Mt Scopus work remained a contentious issue for Kagan. 15 Information of Dawn Kagan, 29 August 2011. Kagan married Dawn Jackson in 1954. 16 Kagan, ‘Travels in Europe’, 328, 327. 17 Walter Rivkin was the father of the late stockbroker Rene Rivkin. 18 Kagan’s papers include pamphlets and publications of the Fabian Society of Queensland; International Group, Balmas; Communist Party of Australia, 305 Sussex Street, Sydney, including Theory and Practise of Leninism; Leon Trotsky, Whither Europe? and many other tracts. He was heavily influenced by Trotsky’s thought. 19 Anatol Kagan, Notebook 2, NRC, 30 April 1975 , 134. 20 The Leningrad studies include maps and plans; enumerable drawings; three albums of streetscape photographs including early postcards, snapshots (loose); 14 saddle-stitched notebooks
containing handwritten drafts of the study; and, the partial typescript of 167 pages. 21 Anatol Kagan, Notebook 2, NRC, 30 April 1975, 134-135. 22 Kagan, ‘Travels in Europe’, 330. Various dates are given for his retirement. 23 In his memoirs Kagan nominates the City Morgue and Coroner’s Court at 42–50 Parramatta Road, Glebe, as one of his works. 24 Kagan also managed a side trip to the USSR during the New York visit. Information of Dawn Kagan, 29 August 2011. 25 Anatol Kagan, ‘Architecture for Mental Health Facilities’ n.d [1971], ms and typescript. 26 Anatol Kagan, ‘Foreign Affairs Communication Centre. Environmental Report’, Parkes, ACT, 1974. The DFAT Communications Centre ‘handl[ed] all official cable traffic between the Australian Government and addresses outside Australia.’ It closed in 2004. www.dfat.gov.au/ dept/ca_2003/ comms_ commemoration.html accessed 17 August 2011. 27 Kagan’s 1975 visit to Leningrad is described in Notebook 2, NRC, 30 April 1975, 135. The 1979 trip was verified by Dawn Kagan, 29 August 2011 28 Information of Dawn Kagan, 29 August 2011. In correspondence with Catherine Townsend at the Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture (1 September 2008), Kagan wrote that his work is in the GLAVAPU archives. This cannot be verified. 29 Information of Dawn Kagan, 29 August 2011.
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ADDITION TO THE COLLECTION
WILLIAM H NANKIVELL COLLECTION
Gift of Peter Nankivell, Sarah Hicks and Priscilla Nelson
This gift includes biographical documentation, diaries, magazines, media clippings, photographs, plans and reports, relating to the life and career of architect William Nankivell (including his partnership with Bernard Joyce). William H Nankivell (1928–2002): architect Harriet Edquist
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Insofar as the architectural practice of Joyce Nankivell has entered the lexicon of local architectural history it has been largely through the figure of Bernard Joyce (1929-1994), a charismatic and conspicuous person whose ‘energy and infectious enthusiasm, delivered with a convoluted and loquacious fluency, was novel and compelling’1. Yet it is clear from the archival evidence that the partnership was symbiotic. Neither Nankivell nor Joyce had developed a strong solo practice before they teamed up in 1964 and while Joyce had certain predilections for systems building it is doubtful whether he would have had the chance to develop them had it not been for his partnership with Nankivell. Yet Nankivell’s contribution to Melbourne architecture has been somewhat overlooked. His architectural records, recently donated to the rmit Design Archives by his children Peter Nankivell, Sarah Hicks and Priscilla Nelson, give cause to reassess this prevailing view. William (Bill) Hugh Nankivell was born in Melbourne on 28 May 1928 to William and Morva Nankivell. His father, William, was a solicitor and reigning Australian amateur golf champion who died in 1929 before Bill was one year old. In 1934 Morva married English naval officer Claude Butlin who commanded the Canberra (he was assigned to the Royal Australian Navy by the Royal Navy) and the family moved to England2. Nankivell commenced boarding school at the age of seven while his parents moved around England and Scotland to various naval postings. At the outbreak of ww11 the family was posted to Bermuda and by 1943 were back in England where Nankivell finished his schooling as a boarder at Haileybury College, Hertfordshire. His inclination was to continue his studies at art school but the family preferred the more practical avenue of architecture so Nankivell enrolled at the Architectural Association in London (aa), completing his diploma in 1952. Alongside peers like Jeffrey Howlett he imbibed the lessons of post-war British Modernism, particularly the work of Erno Goldfinger and the public housing projects of the London County Council then under the command of Sir Leslie Martin. Nankivell completed his compulsory Military Service with the Royal Berkshire Regiment, some of it in Egypt, after which he gained professional experience with the Architects’ Co-Partnership who were involved in prefabricated timber housing for the Volta River development in Ghana, and with Ove Arup3. Prompted by his godfather Len Nettlefield who provided an airfare, Nankivell decided to return to Melbourne in 1956. The city was to host the
Olympic Games and it might have seemed like an auspicious time to visit. In addition, on 28 February, just before he was due to leave London, an exhibition of Australian architecture opened at the riba Gallery and some of the work impressed him, particularly Peter McIntyre’s innovative little hospital at Beulah, north-west Victoria4. Departing on 4 March he travelled via Karachi, New Delhi, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, and arrived in Melbourne on 30 March. Within days he had reunited with his extended family, accepted invitations to lunches, dinners and dinner dances, attended the races, gone surfing at Torquay and inserted himself easily into Melbourne’s social life. He made himself known to the city’s architectural community, visiting the Albert Street office of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Peter and Dione McIntyre at Kew, and caught up with Jeffrey Howlett, at that time a design architect with Bates Smart and McCutcheon. At the end of May, Nankivell set off on a month’s trip around Australia after which the decision to stay in Melbourne may not have been too difficult. The Melbourne architectural scene was stimulating and the perfect locale to indulge his life-long enthusiasm for surfing, skiing and golf. After brief stints with Peter and Dione McIntyre; r s Demaine; and, Russell, Trundle, Armstrong & Orton, Nankivell joined Howlett where he designed his first private job, the Linton house in Rosanna. Howlett however soon returned to Perth where his family had settled and Nankivell teamed up with an older architect, Noel O’Connor. They were in partnership from 1958 to1962 as O’Connor & Nankivell, the latter taking over the design role for a number of two and three-storey cream brick flats in suburbs such as Kew and Armadale.
Image Joyce Nankivell, Perak Turf Club grandstand, Ipoh, Malaysia, c 1968.
In 1961 Nankivell married Patricia Giblett and three years later with baby son ,Peter, they returned to England, spending four months away. When the elderly O’Connor retired, the office’s work dried up, prompting Nankivell to apply for a teaching position at rmit and in about 1962 he was appointed full time lecturer in design and building science with the right to private practice5. Harry Winbush was Head of School and colleagues included Kevin Borland, John Duncan, Bob Irving (until 1962), Anne Montgomery and Bruce Williamson. One of Nankivell’s innovations was to introduce computer technology into the programme, bringing together ‘a number of early computer users including Jennings Industries who were prepared to discuss their experience and answer queries on the state of the art as it existed then’ 6. His future practice was to pioneer the application of computer technology in architecture. 9
WILLIAM NANKIVELL CONTINUED
Nankivell had been involved in voluntary work for some time with the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League (aal) which was established in 1957, the first association of its kind in Australia, and in 1964 was commissioned to design their meeting and recreation hall in Northcote. Completed in 1966 the hall was square in plan, roofed by a hyperbolic paraboloid timber shell, providing ‘a welcome relief to the post and beam architecture often employed on a hall of this nature’ 7. The aal considered ‘this fine building’ one of their major achievements to date and used it ‘for meetings, social functions, and as a rest centre for Aborigine people travelling through Melbourne’ 8. Nankivell might have been inspired by McGlashan & Everist’s Kofler’s restaurant at Mt Buller (1959) but as Philip Goad has noted ‘the number of hyperbolic paraboloids in Melbourne was actually very small’ 9 at this time so the aal hall was somewhat rare and its innovative modernism indicated the forward thinking optimism of the League. Nankivell continued to do work with the aal, designing the Expo-Aborigine exhibition at the Melbourne Town Hall in April 1967, a rural settlement project connected to Doug Nicholls, and the Aboriginal Hostel and Offices in Cunningham Street, Northcote (1974-1975).
Image W H Nankivell, Aborigines Advancement League Headquarters, Melbourne. Photograph: Val Foreman Photography. c1966.
One of Nankivell’s colleagues at rmit was Bernard Joyce whom he already knew through mutual friends. Joyce’s architectural education reflected a different tradition from that of Nankivell; less the AA arts/design-model and more the building and skills-oriented model. He was born in Chiswick on 13 January 1929 and having attended the Hammersmith School of Building, Arts and Crafts during the war (interrupted by evacuations from London) went on to study architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster). He moved to Melbourne in 1949 when he was 20 and completed his architectural education at the University of Melbourne, becoming a registered architect in 1955. He entered design competitions with other students and completed his first house in collaboration with David Brunton and John Lilly in Beaumaris10. He was awarded a studentship with the Public Works Department, won The Age Small Homes competition in 1952, another competition in conjunction with Bernard Slawik in 1954, and with Slawik, Lilly and John Miller gained a commendation for their entry in the Olympic Stadium competition which was published in both Architecture and Arts and the Dutch journal Bouw11. Buoyed by this success Joyce returned to England in 1955, travelling through Europe before returning to Melbourne in 1956.
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Between 1958 to 1962 he gained important experience as a design architect in the office of Bogle & Banfield, being involved in a number of significant projects including St James Church in Glen Iris 12 , Total House car park and offices in Russell Street, Melbourne, and the grandstand at Sandown Park Racecourse, a steel frame reinforced concrete building 366m long with covered seating for 15,000 people 13. In spite of this promising start Joyce’s solo practice failed to take off and for much the same reasons as Nankivell, in 1962 he found himself on the full time teaching staff at rmit lecturing in architecture and interior design14. With his deep commitment to minimalist black, both in dress and in architecture (the legacy of which remains with us still) he was an inspirational teacher as Peter Crone recalled: … [in] early 1962 when Bernard Joyce entered the ‘Theory of Architecture 1-b’ design studio at RMIT and began his amazing semi-abstract discourse, I was not aware that I was listening to a person who would have more influence on my future development as an architect than anyone else.15 In 1964 Nankivell joined forces with Joyce to enter the competition for the Perak Turf Club grandstand at Ipoh in Malaysia. Joyce’s experience on the design of the Sandown grandstand undoubtedly played a substantial role in determining both the decision to enter the competition and their final success. Joyce was interested in contemporary Japanese architecture and no doubt inspired by Robin Boyd’s recentlypublished monograph on Kenzo Tange, travelled to Japan in 1962 to research Japanese architecture and landscape. Either to prepare for the Perak competition or to carry out site investigations he travelled through South-East Asia in 1964, as did Nankivell the following year. The Perak stadium therefore develops the idiom of the modern racing grandstand worked out at Sandown in a Brutalist form inspired by the same Japanese sources that had produced the Total House car park. The Joyce Nankivell partnership formed for the Perak project endured, galvanising both architects and playing to the strength of each. The office became known for flats and multi-unit housing in suburbs such as South Yarra, Toorak, Caulfield and Hawthorn, working directly with developers. Indeed, as Peter Carmichael has noted: ‘Joyce Nankivell worked with some of the most demanding and intractable property developers, and in most cases, managed to satisfy their client’s insular objectives and still deliver buildings of integrity and resolve’16. This environment allowed Joyce to develop his systems approach to building as in the Healy House in Ocean Grove (1967) and
his multiple ‘villa-flats’ housing typology which, Michael Markham argues, presage a new form of urbanism17. Philip Goad on the other hand has situated ‘the typological and structural systems of Joyce Nankivell’ within a local tradition of modernist ‘typological reinvention’ evidenced in ‘the spatial platforms and outdoor rooms of the houses of McGlashan & Everist, the studied informality of Neil Clerehan’s underplayed modern villas [and] the monumental but never neutral urbanity of Yuncken Freeman’18. If in their abstraction and formalisation of living patterns these house types can be compared with the town houses of Clerehan and Guilford Bell, the systems approach has connections with Craig Ellwood and the Case Study Housing programme in Southern California, as Michelle Hamer has noted. 19 In 1974 Joyce Nankivell won the competition for the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur and both partners resigned from rmit. Possibly with this competition in mind Nankivell had toured England and Europe in 1972 with consulates and embassies as one of his foci. In association with Leong Thian Dan Rakan Rakan, Joyce Nankivell designed the building in the Brutalist idiom that was emergent at Perak.20 The ‘L’ shape plan with a lift and service tower at the junction of the wings successfully combined the dual obligations of high security and public
access at the same time incorporating into the total design of the site a large reflecting pool and several existing trees. Featured in the Architectural Review and considered by one local observer to be ‘one of the best examples of Brutalist non-commercial office space’ in Kuala Lumpur, the Australian High Commission deserves to be better known in Australia.21 Following the success of this work Joyce Nankivell went on to design the associated diplomatic staff housing (1977) on two blocks of land in up-market Jalan U Thant, the area given over to foreign embassies. Two houses occupied each site, positioned so as to ensure privacy between them, and while conforming with Government standards the architects gave ‘the illusion of more space by utilising circulation spaces and corridors within living areas and providing adjacent internal courtyards’. 22 Now experienced in design for a tropical climate they also developed types of low-cost housing in Indonesia. Joyce Nankivell’s offices were at 445 Clarendon Street, South Melbourne, a suburb which in the 1960s and 1970s was popular with industrial design and advertising offices. Theirs became a lively hub for ‘after work discussion [where] mordant talk and debate ebbed and flowed with increasing intensity as the consumption of red wine accelerated.’ 23 Nankivell and Joyce went into partnership in the 11
WILLIAM NANKIVELL CONTINUED
South Melbourne Warehouse Gallery which, as its name suggests, was a converted warehouse. They were both keen gallery goers and although it was not a commercial success ‘they had a lot of fun’.24 The venture highlights the broad cultural arena within which the pair operated; Joyce ‘particularly respected sculptor Clement Meadmore, painter Peter Upwood, photographer Kurt Veld, graphic artists Les Mason and Brian Sadgrove. The background music in the office often featured jazz musician Les McCann’. 25 Crone recalls ‘allafternoon’ lunches with Joyce ‘at Vlado’s or Café Eduarde in South Yarra [. . .] often shared by Bruce Weatherhead, Alex Stitt, Fred Schepsi, Kurt Veld and George Kral amongst many’. 26 Veld was Joyce Nankivell’s preferred photographer and Kral ran Gallery A which Nankivell, and presumably Joyce, had frequented since it opened in the late 1950s. On another front, Nankivell, who had become increasingly active in local politics and motivated by concern for inappropriate developments in Hawthorn where he had been a resident since his marriage in 1961, ‘was involved in the first pro-residents push to have council representation 12
and […] became a councillor by winning a contested election’.27 He was elected Mayor in 1977. In the 1980s and 1990s Joyce Nankivell continued to design speculative flats and town houses as well as private residences but moved across into public housing for the active and forward-looking Ministry of Housing. They entered competitions for the City Square (1971), National Archives, Canberra (1978), Parliament House, Canberra (1979), Majestic Site, Perth (1981), Olympics Docklands Ideas (1989), and the Southbank Housing Project (1990). They worked in the burgeoning education sector as well, contributing the McMillan Rural Studies Centre at Warragul which won an raia Merit Award in 1984 and, in collaboration with Demaine Partnership, the Aerospace Industry Training Centre for the new campus of the Broadmeadows College of tafe. After Joyce’s death in 1994, Dominic Kelly and Greg Missingham left Demaines and joined Nankivell to form Nankivell Kelly Missingham Pty Ltd which existed for four years, first at the Clarendon Street premises, then in South Yarra. This practice, which included Robyn Denny, completed work on the
Images Joyce Nankivell, Australian High Commission, Kuala Lumpur, opened 1978. 1 Peter Carmichael quoted in Michael Markham, ‘Obituary’. Bernard Joyce (1929-1994), Transition 46, 1994, 71. 2 Commonwealth of Australia Navy List, July 1932, http://www.navy. gov.au/w/images/Navy_ List-July-1932.pdf, accessed 12 October 2011. 3 Michelle Hamer, ‘B[ill] N[ankivell]: Biography’, unpublished typescript courtesy Peter Nankivell. 4 Hamer, ‘B[ill] N[ankivell]: Biography’ notes Nankivell’s enthusiasm for McIntyre’s work; information on exhibition content and dates courtesy Philip Goad,
Ballarat and Clarendon College, Ballarat; tafe buildings at Rosebud and Central Gippsland, as well as Strategic Resource Plans for Eastern and West Metropolitan tafes.28 In 1994 Michael Larionoff, who had worked in the office between 1988 and 1993, teamed up with two other recent rmit graduates, Vivian Mitsogianni and Dean Boothroyd, to enter the Museum of Victoria competition under the aegis of Joyce Nankivell. While Nankivell didn’t contribute to the scheme he went to see the finished entry and was enthusiastic and supportive of its designers. 29 One of Nankivell’s last works, with Michael Larionoff, was the design and documentation of the Peter and Andrea Nankivell house in Hawthorn (2001-2004), an elegant modernist brick, glass and timber ‘box’ which sits proudly on its suburban block challenging the determinedly heritage tone of its neighbours. Larionoff carried it to completion after Bill Nankivell died on 13 April 2002. Harriet Edquist is Professor of Architectural History, School of Architecture and Design, and Director of the RMIT Design Archives.
email correspondence 12 October 2011; diary entries (Nankivell Collection, RMIT Design Archives) give travel dates. 5 The dates for Nankivell’s employment at RMIT vary. His resumé gives 1962 as the start date; RMIT Prospectuses do not record him before 1964 which suggests that he might have commenced as a sessional staff member, becoming full time at the later date. In his Centenary History of the Faculty of Environmental Design and Construction at RMIT (1987), Granville Wilson gives 1961 as the start date. 6 Wilson, Centenary History, 23. 7 ‘Structural usage of timber around Melbourne – recreational’, Timber Trends, July-August 1966, 3. 8 ‘The A.A.L. in Action’, Smoke Signals, August 1968, 15. 9 Philip Goad, email correspondence, 12 October 2011. 10 See Michelle Hamer, ‘I see a warehouse and I want to paint it black’ in John Macarthur & Anthony Moulis (eds) ADDITIONS to architectural History. XIXth conference of SAHANZ (Brisbane, 2002), 2. 11 Architecture and Arts Special Issue on Olympic Stadia, February–March 1953, 38-41; ‘Olympische Spelen 1956 – Melbourne’, Bouw, 12 September 1953, 720, Bernard Slawik file, RMIT Design Archives.
12 For this commission see Stuart Harrison ‘The post-war tradition of cross-patterning within the suburban church’, in Terrance McMinn, John Stephens, Steve Basson (eds), Contested Terrains, XXIII conference of SAHANZ (Perth 2006), 1-3. 13 ‘New Racecourse and Grandstand for Victoria’, Architecture and Arts, August 1959, 39. 14 Bernard Joyce, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, Nankivell Collection, RMIT Design Archives. 15 Peter Crone quoted in Markham, ‘Obituary’, 72. 16 Carmichael quoted in Markham, ‘Obituary’, 72. 17 Jocelyn Howard, ‘The entertainers. What prominent Melbourne men do to their friends’, Melbourne Observer, undated [c.1969] clipping in Nankivell Collection, RMIT Design Archives. 18 Philip Goad, ‘Beyond Geography. The Architecture of Kerry Hill’, http://www.architecture media .com/aa/aaissue.php ?article=12&issueid=20060 3&typeon=2, accessed 14 October 2011
21 ‘Australia in Malaya’, Architectural Review, March 1979, 133-134; Azrul K. Abdullah, ‘Brutal Practicality’, http://www. mir.com.my/rb/ photography/portfolio/ azrul/html/prac1.html, accessed 14 October 2011. 22 Joyce Nakivell Associates Pty Ltd, ‘Background Editorial Material. Australian Diplomatic Staff Housing’ Malaysia, February 1980’ Nankivell Collection, RMIT Design Archives. 23 Carmichael, quoted in Markham, ‘Obituary’, 71. 24 Peter Nankivell, email correspondence, 12 October 2011. 25 Tim Stanfield, quoted in Markham, ‘Obituary’, 74. 26 Markham, ‘Obituary’, 72. 27 Peter Nankivell, ‘William Hugh Nankivell – Eulogy’, typescript courtesy Peter Nankivell. 28 Information of Greg Missingham, email correspondence, 21 October 2011. 29 Information of Vivian Mitsogianni, email correspondence, 18 October 2011.
19 Hamer, ‘I see a warehouse and I want to paint it black’, 6. 20 Gough Whitlam turned the first sod of the site in Jalan Yap Kwan Seng on 29 January 1974, http://news. google.com/newspapers?ni d=1309&dat=19740129&id =Y90qAAAAIBAJ&sjid=fX0 AAAAIBAJ&pg=4828, 2856009, accessed 14 October 2011.
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Towards a History of Student Activism in Landscape Architecture
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Two recent additions to the RDA provide the start point of a history of student activism in Landscape Architecture in Melbourne. Roderick McIvor’s donation of objects relating to the first Edge conferences record the beginning of an international conference series initiated by Landscape students here and continued by students around Australia and in New Zealand throughout the 1990s, while the gift of Kerb magazines records student initiatives in publication and discourse at RMIT Landscape Architecture.
Gift of Roderick McIvor Documents and objects, including programmes and a T-shirt, relating to the rmit Landscape Architecture programme and to the Edge Conference (1983) and Edge Too Conference (1992) held in Melbourne. Gift of RMIT Landscape Architecture Collection of the Journal Kerb edited by Landscape Architecture students. rmit Landscape Architecture T-shirts 2008-2010 designed by Sean Hogan. Opposite Page Edge Conference 1983, programme, compiled by Maggie Fooke. This Page Edge Too Conference 1992, poster.
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Michael O’Connell: The Lost Modernist Harriet Edquist
RESEARCH
Michael O’Connell: The Lost Modernist (2011) by Harriet Edquist examines the life and career of British-Australian textile designer Michael O’Connell. It is published by Melbourne Books. An exhibition Michael O’Connell: The Lost Modernist is showing at Bendigo Art Gallery from 26 November 2011 to 19 February 2012. The exhibition is curated by Harriet Edquist and Tansy Curtin, Senior Curator, Bendigo Art Gallery.
icamAustralasia Symposium 2011 rmit University, the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne hosted the second annual one day Symposium of icamAustralasia on 28 October. icamAustralasia is the regional chapter of icam (international confederation of architectural museums) which is dedicated to fostering links between those interested in promoting the better understanding of architecture.
Images From Top Harriet Edquist, Michael O’Connell: The Lost Modernist (2011) book cover Michael O’Connell, Leaf and Line, 1950s, © Michael O’Connell, courtesy of DACS. Photograph: Margund Sallowsky. 2011.
The Symposium was attended by representatives from icamAustralasia including the Australian Institute of Architects National Heritage Task Force, Heritage and Conservation Professionals (wa), Public Record Office Victoria, rmit University, State Library of Victoria, University of Auckland, University of Melbourne, University of Newcastle, UniSA (University of South Australia), and the University of Queensland.
Michael O’Connell, Sirens (detail), linocut on linen, c1931, ©Michael O’Connell, courtesy of DACS. Photograph: Margund Sallowsky. 2011.
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